Her bully pulpit is smaller, and her punctuation is certainly better, but Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez behaves almost exactly like President Trump in one respect: She acts like the media are the enemy of the people.

The former bartender and current New York congressional candidate took to Twitter recently to criticize a report on the migrant caravan approaching the U.S. from the direction of Honduras. And then, Ocasio-Cortez ever so casually implied that the reporter was aiding the rise of white supremacy and abetting violence in the process. It was the anatomy of the perfect digital smear:


Cortez makes an argument, sans evidence but with complete confidence. She assumes anyone who disagrees with her is a bad faith actor. She calls out the reporter by name, all but inviting her almost-a-million followers to attack. But Julia Ainsley of NBC News wasn't having any of it.

Ainsley isn’t an easy target though, and she certainly isn’t a shill for Trump, like Ocasio-Cortez accused. The veteran reporter has a decade of experience under her belt, was the first to report on both the administration’s travel ban as well as the family separation crisis, and — in this case — was completely right.

Arguments about whether the caravan-goers should be called asylum-seekers or undocumented migrants can be set aside as a political dispute — the current Justice Department doesn't view public safety concerns in Honduras as legitimate grounds for asylum-seeking, and that's a subject of legal debate, not of a fact-check. And the quibble about whether the caravan will head to ports of entry or break off and cross the border illegally can also be dismissed as completely speculative, since it hasn't happened yet. The caravan is more than a thousand miles away, and no one knows if they will reach the border at all.

What matters here is the fact that Ainsley first reported and that Cortez later took issue with — namely the number of illegal immigrants crossing the border. That number has been increasing, and to prove her reporting, Ainsley pointed to the data from the Border Patrol.


Don’t expect Ocasio-Cortez to correct the record or to call off the digital mob she left behind. Like Trump, she doesn’t admit when she is wrong and, like Trump, she treats the media as a threat. It wasn’t that long ago that Ocasio-Cortez was trying to ban journalists from covering her town halls.

The press was not allowed inside two public meetings in August for fear they might intimidate immigrants, victims of domestic violence, and other people with medical concerns. Reporters with their notebooks and their voice recorders and their questions, the Ocasio-Cortez campaign insisted, would somehow make it impossible for residents to “feel safe discussing sensitive issues in a threatening political time.”


The public needed a safe space, and Ocasio-Cortez decided to protect them from a threatening press. No doubt, she believes she beat back the enemy of the people that time. Trump probably feels similarly. No one is chanting “CNN sucks” at her rallies just yet. But underneath, they share a fundamental distrust of anyone with facts that don’t match their messaging.